Update February 24, 2014.

Since our article appeared, there have been several developments that demand the reader's attention. The scale of electoral interference was found to have been more extensive than we originally reported. Last December, prosecutors investigating the case disclosed that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) had produced over a period of two years leading up to the election some 1900 online posts and approximately 22 million Tweets with political or election-related content-roughly 30% of all election-related content that was generated on Twitter. This was circulated by agents of the NIS's psychological warfare team and hired contractors.

NOTE: This essay, written in January 2013, appears as the first section in a book co-authored by John W. Dower and Gavan McCormack and published in Japanese translation by NHK Shuppan Shinsho in January 2014 under the title Tenkanki no Nihon e: “Pakkusu Amerikana” ka-”Pakkusu Ajia” ka (”Japan at a Turning Point-Pax Americana? Pax Asia?”; the second section is an essay by McCormack on Japan's client-state relationship with the United States focusing on the East China Sea “periphery,” and the book concludes with an exchange of views on current tensions in East Asia as seen in historical perspective). An abbreviated version of the Dower essay also will be included in a forthcoming volume on the San Francisco System and its legacies edited by Kimie Hara and published by Routledge.

As the endnotes reveal, many of the issues addressed here will be familiar to close followers of The Asia-Pacific Journal. The essay was written for a general audience rather than for specialists, with particular concern for calling attention to (1) the interwoven nature of contentious current issues, and (2) their historical genesis in the early years of the cold war, and in some cases earlier. Apart from a few very minor stylistic changes, the contents of the several texts of the essay are identical. No attempt has been made to incorporate developments since early 2013. Only this present version introduces illustrations.

Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George make a case for revisiting Japan's postwar history in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They argue that Japan's problematic responses to the triple disasters of March 2011 warrant re-evaluating the persistent myths of failure and success associated with Japan's “postwar” and “post-bubble” eras.